Dr. Hawa Abdi
Dr Hawa Abdi Diblaawe was born in 1947 in Mogadishu. Her father worked in the city’s port. As the eldest child, she might have been forced to raise her four sisters when her mother died, but, as she recalls, “my father was an educated man”. He made sure that she could pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. With the help of a Soviet scholarship, she studied medicine in Kiev. She became Somalia’s first female gynecologist. She then completed a Law degree at the Somali National University in Mogadishu, where she later also became an assistant professor of medicine, and opened a clinic on her family’s ancestral land near the town of Afgooye. When the war broke out in 1991, she started housing her employees on her land, feeding them and caring for them, then their friends, then the friends of their friends. Her land currently houses more than 90’000 refugees who were displaced in the fighting.
(Portrait of Dr Hawa by Pieter Hugo)